Will Apple Out Evil Google In Advertising?
How much evil will we all stand?
People have had issues with advertisements on the internet for years. With the advent of the internet on mobile phones, those problems are now carried with us wherever we go in the form of phone based apps. The name I see most in mobile advertisements is Admob, which was recently acquired by Google.
Not wanting Google to dominate the ad space on the iPhone, Apple decided to compete directly with Google in this space by purchasing Quattro Wireless, another mobile ad network. To up the ante a bit, according to The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Apple filed two patents. One is a patent on ads that will move themselves around so that they become progressively harder to ignore and the other is a patent for proximity based ads.
Imagine walking past a Starbucks while you’re using an iPhone app. An ad pops up for the specific Starbucks coffee location you are walking past. Then the ad moves about, annoying you until you click on it, forcing you to view the ad before it will allow you to go back to using your app in peace. That sounds like the potential destruction of the user experience on the iPhone to me. What could be worse than that?
The answer to that question is the complete loss of your data privacy. In order to serve these ads, Apple would have to use the GPS in the iPhone to locate where you are at all times, constantly send that information up to their servers and serve you ads based on that information. That means that Apple would know where you were at all times. That’s a pretty scary thought. It also opens up a host of concerns, such as:
- Would Apple store that location information permanently, for a short period of time or immediately erase it?
- Would Apple look at your search history in Mobile Safari to fine tune your advertisements to make them even more targeted?
- Would Apple make this tracking opt-in, opt-out or mandatory?
- Would Apple automatically include this in all apps or just allow publishers to utilize it if they want?
Now, I’m not a fanatic about my data privacy, as is quite apparent, since I’m on Twitter, Facebook, have a blog and do all of that under my real name and photo. That doesn’t mean that I want any company to have the level of detailed information that Apple could acquire in this scenario. If Apple went whole hog with this type of ad hosting, I would definitely be forced off of the iPhone. No phone is worth that invasion of my privacy. If all smart phones implemented something like this, I would go back to a dumb phone. I wouldn’t enjoy it, but I’d do it. Luckily, I don’t think there is much of a chance of Apple doing something that would completely degrade the elegance and customer experience of one of their products. And I don’t think that Apple is making these moves to beat Google at their own game. Please Apple, prove me right.
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Apple would have to make A LOT of money to tarnish its reputation by using invasive advertising on the iPhone. If the user experience is degraded too much, people (including me) will stop using their iPhones, and others just won’t buy iPhones to begin with.
The location-based data is a concern. But, I check in (almost!) everywhere that I go via Twitter, anyway. So, it may not even matter.